


Shadowspoke

by Medie



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Community: trope_bingo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-30
Updated: 2013-10-30
Packaged: 2017-12-30 22:35:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1024190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Medie/pseuds/Medie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's young when she realizes that she can see them, too young to understand what it is that she sees, but old enough to understand she's afraid of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadowspoke

**Author's Note:**

> for the AU: Supernatural square on my trope_bingo card

She sees them in the shadows. The answers to questions no one knows to ask. They're always there. She's young when she realizes that she can see them, too young to understand what it is that she sees, but old enough to understand she's afraid of them. Mom tries to listen when she tries to explain, talking fast about what the shadows are telling her, but Daddy doesn't, and she learns soon not to mention anything she sees. It worries him and she doesn't like to make them worry.

Jaime sees it too, but she's quieter about it, and Jennifer doesn't know until it's too late.

Not until she's holding her sister's necklace in her hand and sees her shadow grow short just before the door closes behind her.

She doesn't say anything after that. Not when she finds her sister's body, feels the shadow curl a sad goodbye around her wrist, and the whisper of truth make its way along her spine. After that, Jennifer learns silence.

Soccer is an escape. Warm afternoons with the sun high overhead and stadium floodlights to chase away the shadows, stretch them out until they're too thin to make sense of, hiding their secrets in the splay over tile and grass.

She loves soccer even as she hates it. It's an escape into normal and she wishes she'd never known. She comes home from practice too tired to remember to avoid looking.

It's like being free. 

Until it isn't.

The team does better, wins, and people start paying attention. They come to the games, their shadows reaching across the field, stretching in the afternoon sun and curling around her body as she runs.Their secrets cloy at her skin, pull at her steps, and she can hear the whispers. Sometimes, she turns around and catches a glimpse of something twisted and wrong. 

It won't leave her again. The running doesn't work, exhaustion is no escape, and she isn't surprised. 

It was always a temporary fix and, like her sister before her, she has to find her own permanent solution.

She isn't Jaime. Even with the worst of secrets laid out before her, stretching across the ground at her feet, she knows that she isn't Jaime.

There's another way, her way, and sometimes she thinks the shadows are trying to send her toward it. She catches glimpses in them, slivers of light in the dark, but it's difficult to keep a grip. It's a learned skill. She recognizes that even as they slip through her fingers and are swallowed by the darkness.

Jennifer lets them fall, accepting that she'll learn to pick them up later, and that maybe even more than later, is how she finds it. She presses forward and makes herself look, pushing herself to sift through people's shadows and weigh out their secrets. Sexuality, spirituality, truth and lie, desire and repulsion; she teaches herself to see and sort through it until she finds the mundane amidst it all. 

College is a quick teacher and she learns to catch everything as she goes. A quick dash through the hall on her way to class and she can see every worry, every elation, in every shadow she crosses.

But she's an amateur compared to David Rossi. 

She picks up his book in a friend's apartment. She can't miss it; there are shadows leaking from every page. She's asking to borrow it even before she picks it up, the shadows catching at her fingers and curling around them in their excitement.

Reading it is almost an afterthought to understanding to learning. The shadows he's woven into every word and every thought speak their truths to her long before she reaches their page. He's the first person outside her sister and her mother who can do what she does and she can feel the skill he's developed to control it soaking through every word and every sentence.

He's made it into a weapon, wielding it like a blade, and she sees what she can do.

What she can be.

He gives a reading and she goes. She watches and she listens. Sees how he avoids the shadows of his audience, never allowing his to cross theirs, and never once looks her way.

Later, he signs her book, her shadow brushes his. The restrained power is staggering, but she feels him falter and push back against hers.

A smile curves his hips, but he still doesn't look up.

She watches his pen dash across the page, but makes herself leave before opening the book and looking down.

 _a real pain in the ass, trust me I know, but keep at it, kid. You figure this thing out, you'll give them hell._


End file.
